Eircom customers were greeted to a rude reality yesterday morning as the ISP formally began blocking access to Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs.

The move is a result of a settlement reached between it and the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) who accused the ISP in court of not doing enough to combat copyright infringement by its subscribers.

via Irish ISP Begins Blocking the Pirate Bay.

The facility at the Grange Castle Business Park covers 303,000 square feet, or almost seven acres more than twice the size of the playing surface at Croke Park. The centre is part of Microsoft’s investment in cloud computing, and houses tens of thousands of computer servers running the company’s online software and services.

It is the company’s first so-called ‘mega data centre’ outside the US, and is seen as an important investment by the firm, which already employs about 1,200 people full-time in Dublin.

via Sunday Business Post | Irish Business News.